I recently emailed Alliant concerning the use of their Steel shotgun powders in handguns:
To: Alliant Reloading
Subject: Alliant Powder - Ask the Expert Form
I've used your Steel shotgun powder in the .44 Mag and .500 S&W mags and
it seems to work quite well. However I can find no information on using
this powder in a handgun. Is it unsafe or just unknown or ?? Thanks!
this is the reponse I received:
"We tried some STEEL in 44 mag years ago and the results were dismal.
The velocity/pressure variations were extreme. I recommend either our
2400 or 300MP powders. For these powders, data is available so there is
no need to speculate as you have done with STEEL. Thanks for your note
and have a nice day.
Ben Amonette
Consumer Service Manager"
I'll continue to work with this powder and heavy bullets as the results appeared pretty good to me. I'll chrono graph some and see how consistant they are. Perhaps Alliant only tried the powder with lighter bullets?
From what I can tell so far the powder is quite a bit slower than Blue Dot. I loaded 14 gr. behind a 310 gr. bullets and the load was quite mild- the max load of Blue Dot Alliant shows with a 240 gr. bullet is only 13.7 although my Sierra manual shows 14.6 gr with a 300 gr. bullet.
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